@dropseed — home of https://www.dependencies.io, https://about.pullapprove.com, and https://about.sibbell.com

Apr 19, 2015

Sibbell — emails for new releases on GitHub

As a developer, I leverage tons of open source projects to help me get good work done quickly. Judging by the popularity of GitHub…I don’t think I’m alone in that. One problem I’ve realized is that there is no good way for me to know when those projects I like and use get updated. The idea is pretty simple, when Twitter Bootstrap gets updated, that’s something I want to know about right away.

You would think that this is something that GitHub would be good for, and you’d be half right.

So when I say ‘updated’ what we’re really talking about are new releases. ‘Releases’ are an entity on GitHub, tied directly to Git tags. Almost any semi-serious projects uses ‘releases’ on GitHub.

Getting notifications for new releases seems like a pretty simple thing! GitHub does this, but only if you ‘watch’ the repo. And the problem with watching? You get notified for every issue, pull request, and comment along with the published releases. There’s no middle ground, and while it’d be a pretty simple thing for them to add, I decided there’s no reason for me to wait for something that might never even happen.

Right now Sibbell works in one easy way, have it notify you for any new releases for repos that you’ve starred on GitHub. That’s it. I wanted it to be as simple as possible from the start, but if people find it appealing, there’s all kinds of things you could do with it.